Alamodome

About Alamodome

The Alamodome is a 65,000 seat, multi-purpose facility that is primarily used as a football/basketball stadium and convention center in San Antonio, Texas, USA. The facility opened on May 15, 1993, at a cost of $186 million.

Along with placating the San Antonio Spurs ownership's demands for a larger basketball venue, the multi-purpose facility was intended to increase the city's convention traffic and attract a professional football franchise. The Spurs played basketball in the Alamodome for a decade, then became disenchanted with the facility and convinced Bexar County to construct them and the San Antonio Livestock Exposition Inc. a new arena now called the AT&T Center.

The facility is a rectilinear 5-level stadium which can seat up to 65,000 spectators for a typical football game and is expandable to hold 72,000 spectators, allowing the possibility to host a Super Bowl. The arena configuration (basketball/hockey) takes 12-18 hours to set up retractable seating and install the playing surface. In this configuration, typically only the two lower levels at one or both ends of the facility are used. The arena configuration seats 20,662 spectators and can be expanded to 39,500 when the upper level is opened. When the Spurs played home games here 3 upper decks were used in selected games and in the playoffs increasing the capacity to 35,000, while the other was covered by a large curtain containing the spurs division title banners, retired number banners and 1999 championship banner